Hi all,
We've always had a good number of failed merges each week due to the good ole "activity happened on the kept account" error. Sometimes I can see that something physically happened and so the error is legitimate (not that I always agree with it failing the merge because of that... but that's a different story). I also noticed a while ago that the LP_CUSTOMER_RANK was causing a lot of unwanted activity. Since we don't currently use ranking I disabled it which kind of helped.
But I find myself looking into this issue again as we've still been having a crazy number of merges failing each week and most of them are consistently the same people. This is what I've found and I'm looking for some advice on what other people have done.
The majority of the failures seem to be happening because of our nightly Manage Constituency updates. It's funny because most of these people have had the constituency for several months and the last_update_dt in TX_CONST_CUST is from several months ago. But their last_update_dt in T_CUSTOMER is for the exact time of the last constituency update run. How have other people gotten around this? Should I stop using the Manage Constituencies report and write up LPs to apply constituencies that don't modify the account unnecessarily?
This also leads me to wonder how I'll handle the ranking procedure and merges when we start using ranking in the future...
Thanks for any advice!
Hi Beth,
The merge process looks at t_customer.last_activity_dt to determine if there has been activity since the last merge. It compares that against t_potential_dups.last_update_dt.
Is there anything you are doing in your nightly jobs that is updating t_customer.last_activity_dt?
Thanks,David
We had a lot of failures in the past for a very similar reason (that is nightly jobs stepping on the merge job).
Hi David,
Yes, the Manage Constituencies utility seems to be updating t_customer.last_activity_dt even if no changes were made to that particular account. I'm assuming simply because it needed to access the constituent record? I'm not really sure.
Thanks! Beth
Hi Gawain,
This sounds like it is no longer an issue... So I'm curious as to how you resolved it! Did you change how your nightly jobs work or was there some sort of customization to the merge procedure?
I looked at the code behind the Manage Constituency job, and you are correct – it is updating t_customer.last_activity_dt for all constituents in the specified list, even if it didn’t actually change anything. I would suggest opening a ticket with Tessitura on that, as it doesn't really make a lot of sense for last_activity_dt to be updated when there was no change (at least in my opinion).
You may also be able to refine your list criteria. I’m not sure what your Manage Constituency job(s) are doing, but I assume some are an action of Add to List. You could probably filter out constituents that already have the constituency you are trying to add, thus preventing the procedure from touching the last_activity_dt unnecessarily.
Thanks,
David